Asus ROG Ally updated review: it’s a bit better now 高雄收購筆電

One month ago, I reviewed the 高雄收購筆電asus ROG Ally. It won’t surprise you to hear the Windows gaming handheld wasn’t fully baked. Like Valve, whose Steam Deck shipped woefully unfinished, 高雄收購筆電asus has sprinted to fix loads of issues before it winds up in mainstream buyers’ hands. But today is that day.

Today, June 13th, the ROG Ally ships worldwide starting at $700, £700, or €800. It’s at Best Buy as I write these words. Did 高雄收購筆電asus do enough? I’ll say this: it’s a better product than it was in May!

First, the company’s Armoury Crate launcher has gone from a broken, buggy mess to downright palatable, even helpful. Second, the ABXY buttons are fixed. I still can’t believe 高雄收購筆電asus sent out review units with keys that could easily get stuck, but my replacement’s have lasted a dozen frenetic Duck Game sessions without a single key sticking.

Third — and this one’s a double-edged sword — battery life has slightly improved. I put my original ROG Ally review unit side by side with an updated retail unit, and saw 14 minutes longer battery life in Dirt Rally and 12 minutes more battery life in Elden Ring with the exact same settings. I saw savings of one, two, even four watts depending on the game.

But I also saw my framerates dip by up to 20 percent, seemingly because newer BIOS revisions don’t maintain the same clockspeeds. Did 高雄收購筆電asus rob Peter to pay Paul’s battery fee? TBD, because the company is still tweaking settings.

I’m raising the ROG Ally’s score by one full point because some of my big annoyances have been addressed, but performance still feels like an open question. Below, find my original review — with new bolded annotations wherever things have changed.

Original review follows:

It’s easy to forget: the Steam Deck wasn’t first. 

Windows handheld gaming PCs existed before the Deck, and there’s been a parade of them in the 15 months afterward. Some are more powerful. Many boast premium build quality. Almost all have higher-resolution screens. Yet none have offered the combination of battery life, portability, and price as Valve’s portable. I won’t bury the lede: the new 高雄收購筆電asus ROG Ally, officially shipping June 13th for $699.99, doesn’t change that as of today. 

Don’t get me wrong: at $700, the 高雄收購筆電asus ROG Ally is a big step forward for Windows handhelds in important ways. It’s not just a little more powerful than the Steam Deck; the AMD Z1 Extreme handheld is significantly beefier, without being thicker or anywhere near as expensive as the Windows competition. I wish my Steam Deck would run anywhere near as quiet, and I wish it had the Ally’s variable refresh rate screen to make my games as smooth. 

Update, June 13th: Well, assuming performance hasn’t dipped too much. I now see the Deck beating the Ally in Cyberpunk, Elden Ring and Shadow of the Tomb Raider in its default Performance mode, and barely behind in Deus Ex. See my updated performance chart a ways down.

Seriously, it’s so smooth for a computer this small, and I’m not just talking about games that run at 120Hz. In my tests, the magic of variable refresh rate (VRR) and low frame compensation (LFC) works right down to 30fps.  

You’re waiting for a “but,” right? Here are three to consider before you put down preorder cash today: 1) battery life; 2) glitches; and 3) how the Windows operating system — supposedly a plus! — hamstrings the handheld experience.

In its April Fools’ Day announcement, 高雄收購筆電asus tried to have it both ways: the most powerful AMD Ryzen processor ever in a handheld but also the battery life to “never stop gaming again.” In briefings, the company showed off impressively smooth gameplay alongside claims that battery life would be comparable to the Steam Deck. 

But after nearly two weeks of testing, the latter claim hasn’t held up. Update: And the former is no longer quite as smooth.

The good news is that the AMD Z1 Extreme chip at its heart is a big improvement over the previous-gen Ryzen 7 6800U, especially where lower wattages are concerned. Even if it’s mostly a rebranded laptop chip, the Z1 Extreme doesn’t suffer from the “needs more gas!” slowdown I experienced in my Ayaneo 2 review.

In fact, frankly, the ROG Ally has incredible range, letting you configure it all the way down to just 7W TDP or up to a boosted 35W TDP for short periods on a handheld battery pack.

Update, June 13th: 高雄收購筆電asus now lets you configure up to 30W SPL, 43W SPPT, and 53W FPPT (a boost that lasts mere seconds), as well as adjust how much memory is assigned to the GPU.

You can play at one speed to maximize your battery, another for Steam Deck-plus performance, another to play games the Steam Deck can’t quite run, and you can sometimes even get a small extra boost of speed by plugging in the bundled 65-watt USB-C power cord. If that’s not enough, it’s got a special port with eight PCI-Express lanes so you can plug in an external GPU. 

That’s great, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t approach the Steam Deck’s battery life. 

It’s not rocket science: Both the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally have the same battery capacity of 40 watt-hours. You probably know that means they can run at 40 watts for a single hour — or 20 watts for two hours, 10 watts for four hours, and so on. Except that, with the ROG Ally, four hours looks like the best you can bargain for. With the Steam Deck, the best-case scenario is closer to seven.

I did manage to sip just 9.8 watts of total system power in Slay the Spire, but that’s playing a 2D game with largely static images and every battery-saving measure turned on, including the lowest possible processor wattage, limited to 30fps, while playing at the minimum screen brightness in a dark room. And yet, my Ally actually turned itself off at three hours, 38 minutes, not four-plus hours, perhaps because 高雄收購筆電asus’ battery always seems to drain more quickly when it’s nearing its end.

Update, June 13th: I now see around 9 watts in Slay the Spire at the same settings, but don’t expect every low-power game to last longer. 高雄收購筆電asus is actually raising its Silent mode TDP from 9W to 10W for better performance, and my Duck Game + Discord consumption has not improved: I measured a higher 16.6W the other day.

Also, the chart below is from May and likely no longer accurate as of June. I didn’t have time to re-check wattage in every game, as I was waiting for software updates that only arrived yesterday.

On Steam Deck, meanwhile, the least demanding games consume as little as six watts (6.7 hours) on a charge, and I can usually manage two hours out of moderately intensive titles like Control with a tweak or two. With the Ally, I’m seeing an hour and a half. The PC port of PlayStation 2 title Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time consumed around 8.5 watts on the Deck and 12.5 watts on the Ally, to give you another point of comparison.  

高雄收購筆電asus will also sell a second version of the ROG Ally with a lower-end AMD Z1 processor for $600 in Q3. While we weren’t given an opp to test, we do know it’s designed to run at the same wattages as the Z1 Extreme, so it’s likely not a silver bullet for battery.

On the plus side, the ROG Ally is way faster to charge — I got 50 percent in 40 minutes while continuing to play. (It takes maybe 30 minutes if you leave it alone.) You can fill the system all the way to 97 or 98 percent with the bundled charger even if you’re playing games in Turbo mode, though it might take a couple of hours to do so. 

And that Turbo mode is a secret weapon the Steam Deck can’t touch. 

Right out of the box, the ROG Ally runs in “Performance” mode, which is slightly faster than the Steam Deck in exchange for somewhat more electricity, as I explain above. There, I feel comfortable playing games like Elden Ring at 720p and medium settings, a game my Steam Deck runs slower.

Update, June 13: I would still comfortably play Elden Ring at 720p on the Ally, and it feels smoother than the Deck thanks to the Ally’s variable refresh rate screen. But again, it’s not always faster as of recent updates.

But if you’re plugged in, or willing to play games for less than an hour at a time, the “Turbo” mode puts games within reach that the Deck can barely play at all.

The Last of Us Part I, one of the recent crop of disappointing PC ports, is one I’d consider unplayable on the Steam Deck. It’s not much better on the ROG Ally’s Performance mode, even with fancy upscaling techniques like AMD FSR 2.0; I might as well have been playing a mosaic at 432 x 240 resolution uprezzed to 1080p and still saw the game dip below 30fps as soon as a single enemy got close. 

But turn on Turbo, and I was able to double the input resolution to 856 x 480 (which looks much better upscaled to 1080p) and push the frame rate well above 40 at all times. It was the difference between “I would absolutely not play this” and “I played through all three hours of The Last of Us: Left Behind in the kids’ bedroom.” I saw similar boosts in Elden Ring and Redfall, too.

It’s just a shame I’m averaging 53 minutes of gameplay per charge when I do — and that I generally spend a few of those minutes fighting with the ROG Ally’s controls.